Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday April 22, 2014 @05:47PM
from the it's-dangerous-to-go-alone,-take-this-ipod dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Andrew Kelley was a big fan of the Amarok open source music player. But a few years ago, its shortcomings were becoming more annoying and the software's development path no longer matched with the new features he wanted. So he did what any enterprising hacker would do: he started work on a replacement. Three and a half years later, his project, Groove Basin, has evolved into a solid music player, and it's still under active development. Kelley has now posted a write-up of his development process, talking about what problems he encountered, how he solved them, and how he ended up contributing code to libav."

Personally, when I open my music player, I want to see only songs, not videos or what have you. And I want to see them divided by folders, not by artist, by album, genre or whatever. Folders are way easier to organize - at least for those of us that kept a fairly organized selection from the start. So my (admittedly retro) software bundle of choice is Dolphin > Totem. Extremely simple and with a fairly clean interface, just the way I want it. I think I'm in a small niche, though.

I prefer it the same, and to the point of building my own software to do it properly.

I've gone one better - I whipped up a little tcl/tk (wish) script that uses the locatedb to show me my music files*, so I never have to click "open" or "import" or any of that crap. I simply type parts of the filename that I remember into a box and it only displays the matches:-)

I don't have to open my music player. Setup mpd so my music is "always on", connect to it with Cantata, vlc, sonata, mocp, my Android, etc. Pretty much anything that can connect/output the stream. Use conky on the desktop to show what's playing.

That's really an outdated way to do things. A song or artist could be categorized across multiple genres. What about collaborations? What about "Walk this Way" with Aerosmith and Run DMC? Do I make multiple copies if I sort folders by artist/genre etc?

The file system is terrible for organizing music. My music is sorted into folders, too, but it lacks. The music player has to make up for the short comings.

When they upgraded to 3.0 it go too bloated and slow. I can start up that Winamp and its footprint is so small you would be surprised, running with an 8MB MP3 loaded and it still took up less than 10 MB. I can run Solitaire on my PC and listen to music and the card game is a bigger resource hog.

It was around 3.0 when AOL bought it and required they throw in everything but the kitchen sink and bloat it that it died.

Winamp classic got it right. It looks like a tape player, it works like a tape player, only it plays mp3's. It doesnt eat up my whole system to do it, even when i put a 1000+ song playlist in it. And it doesnt try to be my all encompassing multi-media front-end / librarian.

Well it does.. but you can turn that shit off.

VLC is great too... except it chokes if you throw more than a couple dozen files at it.

I'm listening to Winamp 5.666 right now. Winamp is still being actively developed. [winamp.com] I strongly prefer it over things like iTunes and Amarok. The compact design that hails from the era of 800x600 being a common resolution is very nice, the playlist is very compact yet the font size is configurable and the list is resizable, and if I want to listen to anything I know, I just hit "j" and start typing. The only things that are remotely as good are clones of Winamp. Ugly full-screen grey-white music players with

This is my audio player of choice. Lyrics on the player Window. No problems setting up any hotkeys. Reasonably configurable interface. Doesn't look like it was made in 1998. Reasonable song information management. All those online music platforms which I do not use. By far the most well rounded player in Linux.

It is only barely relevant, but I fully agree with this AC. FOSS programs, if they're ever going to garner sufficient usership needs to have easily pronounceable names because, like it or not, word of mouth is the most trusted form of marketing.

Foobar2000 runs perfectly under WINE on Linux and OS X [github.com]. I have been using it for years without any problems. So far, the only flaw I have found is that it does not find new music placed into your media folder after it finishes scanning for new files during start-up, so you have to restart the thing to help it find music just added.

Foobar2000 runs perfectly under WINE on Linux and OS X [github.com]. I have been using it for years without any problems. So far, the only flaw I have found is that it does not find new music placed into your media folder after it finishes scanning for new files during start-up, so you have to restart the thing to help it find music just added.

For values of "perfectly" that include pops, clicks, distortion, and lack of 24-bit support, in my experience.

Foobar2000's big win is in its music library handling. You can view it by folder, by genre, by artist, by album artist, or make up your own sort criteria (including sorting by any tag that you might define). Nothing else I've tried even comes close.

Regarding your base question, foobar2000 is simply an extremely powerful, sufficiently minimalistic, extremely easy to use and extremely configurable music player with a clean interface and support for every format I can think of, including esoteric Amiga tracker stuff. In it I can also organize and control music by superior means to any other program I know of, by the virtue of its easily macro-able tagging and renaming functions. In pure functionality and usability in a single-computer environment, MPD, o

The Ultimate Music Player would be a solid port of Foobar2000 to Linux. Groove Basin...not so much.

OOh it's annual piss on someone's parade day, same as every day!

The poster posted a long, interesting article about building a good (as defined by a list of features, including things like lack of glitchiness and UI responsiveness), solid music player using open source software. The article covered in quite entertaining depth almost every layer of the stack from libav to web interfaces to automatic volume adju

I do web development for a living, and I've even built my own front end to mpd in HTML5 (and a backend controller, so technically not a front end to mpd the daemon, but it handles the UI part). Its integrated into my HTPC software. I moved to a WD TV live about a year ago, for Netflix, but I've since got netflix working on my HTPC (via Pipelight) so I'm moving back when I can get some new, more effic

I don't know what he has against Amarok, he could have the same funcionality (or at least very close to) if he had writen some plugins for Amarok.
Actually it would be better, because lots of other people could use it without the need to change players.
The one thing I miss for Amarok is a good Android remote control with a widget, there is one at the Play store but it is old as hell and doesn't have a widget and the source code is not published.

So a usable web interface to manage a playlist of my media collection, sounds interesting. Now I just need an easy way to pipe the audio into my house and turn it off when watching something on TV. An XBMC plugin would do it.

The player analyses each track so that all songs are uniformly loud, not that it alters your volume setting. This is so, if you have 2 tracks playing next to each other - the first quiet, the second mastered to be loud - you won't hurt yourself if you turned up the volume to hear the first one ok.

I use mpd as desktop music play for several years, I also use it on my raspberry-like box. I miss a decent web gui, I isn't a must have, but nice to have feature. Sometimes I would like to listen to music from my browser far away form home. It seems this music player know everything I need, and has even mpd compatible interface, so the desktop client I use with mpd should also work with this. If I would design a music player, it would be exactly the same. I'm seriously considering migrating to Groove Basin.